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Dev Diary #158 - Wandering Nobles

Hello there!

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these, so I figured I could give a short presentation of myself. I’m @Snow Crystal , one of the two Design Leads on CK3, and I have been around at Paradox on different projects since CK2’s Holy Fury (my first DLC). It’s my pleasure to present our last entry in Chapter 3, namely, the Wandering Nobles DLC.

Vision​

As we set out to create this piece of content, our primary goal was to see if we could spend more time with the traveling system from Tours & Tournament. It was a system that was generally well-liked internally and externally, and we knew we would most likely be used a fair bit by adventurers (though exactly how that game loop would turn out was unclear at the time). We wanted to continue experimenting with it and see if we could add more content to it in different ways.

Since I have seen some confusion about this, one thing to clarify is that the Wandering Nobles is not a Landless Adventurer DLC. It was made primarily for landed gameplay, and though much of it is also available to landless characters, they are not the pack's focus. In other words, this DLC will not have unique landless features, new contracts, or anything locked to the adventurer playstyle.

Even though I will not go into detail about events, a plethora of new events are spread throughout the different features that will be detailed here, as well as a slew of new travel events. In this event pack, we tied them all into things the player will choose to engage with, see activities, lifestyle, and travel, rather than having them appear seemingly at random.

Lifestyle​


Besides the traveling focus, what you can find in the pack is our first new lifestyle since the game's release. This avenue of content has remained almost untouched since the game was first released, except for adventurer-specific perks in Roads to Power, which we wanted to try and experiment with. It is set up like all other lifestyles in the game, with 27 perks split across 3 lifestyle trees, 3 focuses, 3 traits, and landless perk variants where needed.

One essential philosophy of the new lifestyle tree is that we wanted it to be a tree where you had to engage with it rather than having it simply engage with you. In other words, there are fewer passive bonuses, and most bonuses are gained by engaging in travel or activities. In that sense, we tried to go for impactful effects and bonuses from the perks, but at an opportunity and gold cost. We will talk at length about the lifestyle trees and perks next week, but I wanted to give you a small look at what it looks like.

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Activities​

In the DLC, we have included three activities, each associated with (and unlocked by) one of the new lifestyle trees. They are intended to be about the size of the University Visit we introduced in Wards & Wardens, giving landed rulers more opportunities to travel through your realm or abroad. Two of the new activities are set in your realm, whereas one takes you outside your borders.

When we created these new activities, one of our philosophies was that we wanted them to be deeply tied to each of the lifestyle trees, synergizing in different ways and playing into the strengths of the lifestyle tree. That way, investing in the lifestyle tree opens up an activity that lets you continue to build down that route.

The first activity we will examine is Inspection, where you can choose to travel to a specific part of your realm to ensure that it is well-run. You will be able to decide what parts of realm management you would like to focus on, and if you travel to a border county, you might even get vassalization acceptance from neighboring rulers or claims on their lands.

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Our second activity, the Monument Expedition, involves traveling to a distant city to see its sights. This allows you to visit specific places with Points of Interest, which you’d previously have to drop by as you pilgrimage elsewhere.

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The final activity, the Hike, is one where you can temporarily leave behind the stress of court life and seek the calm of nature. Shy characters, you poor souls who would desperately try to lose stress through feasts, I see you.

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Battle Points of Interest​

As a travel-focused pack, we wanted to include something new for the players to see as they traveled around the map. One I had wanted to include for a while was points of interest focused on battles. These new points of interest will come in two forms: dynamically created ones as particular battles happen on the map and historical ones set up from the start of the game.

For the historical ones, we have some that can be seen in all our bookmarks and others that can only be seen in later bookmarks, like two related to the fight over England in 1066.

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A Toast for Your Travels​

One minor addition to this patch is a new building and court position, primarily for Catholics but accessible by anyone with a new cultural tradition. The building can only be built in Catholic churches by default, but in any city for those who choose to get the cultural tradition. It is intentionally made to have a fair number of county-wide bonuses rather than holding specific ones and opening the new Court Brewmaster Court Position for whoever is in charge of the county.

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Until Next Time​

That was all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this first look at Wandering Nobles. We will look in-depth at the activities and lifestyle perks next week. Until then, I figured I’d show some of the new art we have in the DLC to tide you over.

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I love that points of interest will be created for battles that happen in-game. Can I ask what will be the logic behind selecting a certain battle over others? Will it be size, how decisive it was for that particular war or something else?
It has a couple of requirements, and it will have to fulfill a certain amount of them. It can be things like:
- Slaying your primary war opponent at war, or an heir of theirs
- Capturing one of them
- Battles with a lot of casualties
- Battles where you won with a significantly smaller army

any chance of a ui adjustment to the traits section bundled with this bontent pack? was hoping wed see some kind of click to expand with rtp but no such luck. as is, i usually gotta rely on mods to be able to see my hastiluder trait experience

with more traits and more opportunities to gain traits in this latest dlc and every dlc prior, i feel like its pretty massively overdue, no offence
There's not a lot of UI changes in the pack, I'm sorry to say.
 
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It would be cool if the Dutch, Flemish, and Walloon cultures had "brewing" added to their culture. Maybe an extra court position for this: Abbot Trappist (only possible for a monk).

Extra piety, extra control, and extra gold.

Maybe only possible when you build a monastery, because the title of Trappist is linked to a monastery.
The Trappist monastic order is widely anachronistic for CK's time period. The Trappist order, or to be correct, Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance was founded in 1664. So they shouldn't have this.
 
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Minor thing but inspections should really grant legitimacy. You’re performing the roles of rulership and making yourself seen which should almost always give legitimacy
and reduce it if one behaves like a tyrant e.g. during an inspection (just guessing here, I don't even know if that's possible)
 
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Can things 'go wrong' in any of these activities? Like an inspection going badly and everyone being mad at you, or being attacked during a hike, etc.

Thank you for all the work you do.
 
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Can things 'go wrong' in any of these activities? Like an inspection going badly and everyone being mad at you, or being attacked during a hike, etc.

Thank you for all the work you do.
The hikes are fairly safe, as far as I remember.
The inspection have a success chance of succeeding (similarly to Hunts), so they cannot go proper badly, but you can fail to get anything out of them. And you have some events in the inspection where you can get rewards but piss people off, if I recall correctly.
 
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Several questions:

  • what are the differences between Inspection from this DLC and the Grand Tour from the T&T DLC?
  • does Monument Expedition only counts the final destination or all the cities along the way? Cause if it is the latter then I am afraid that it's gonna end up with even bigger stat bloats.
  • does the rewards for Battle POIs are always the same? As in no matter what ruler I play they will always gain Organiser and 200 Martial XP (in this example)? Or maybe it depends on traits and for example Martial Educated characters gets 200 or more and martial-averse characters gets much less XP (for example shy characters or characters with different education)?
  • are the dynamic Battle POIs losing their status over time or after playing the game through 2-3 generations will every single point on the map be "special"?
 
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Several questions:

  • what are the differences between Inspection from this DLC and the Grand Tour from the T&T DLC?
  • does Monument Expedition only counts the final destination or all the cities along the way? Cause if it is the latter then I am afraid that it's gonna end up with even bigger stat bloats.
  • does the rewards for Battle POIs are always the same? As in no matter what ruler I play they will always gain Organiser and 200 Martial XP (in this example)? Or maybe it depends on traits and for example Martial Educated characters gets 200 or more and martial-averse characters gets much less XP (for example shy characters or characters with different education)?
  • are the dynamic Battle POIs losing their status over time or after playing the game through 2-3 generations will every single point on the map be "special"?
  • Inspection are singular, whereas Grand Tour are plural. Inspections focus on the place, and gives you more options on how to deal with and what you'd like to improve, whereas the Tour focus more on the ruler of the land. Inspections can be used on your own domain, whereas Tour can only be used in vassal lands.
  • Monument Expedition only counts the final destination, where the activity properly takes place.
  • They are not always the same.
  • They will not lose their status, but the dynamic ones are intended to be very rare, and they have a cooldown in regions so they cannot overload a region even if a couple of generations pass.
 
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Are there any significant changes/updates to the travel system? I think the base system added with the Tours and Tournaments update is pretty solid, but there are some rough points that could use alleviating. For example, if you host an event (feast, wedding, tournament) it often takes months or even years for everyone to arrive. During that time you can’t declare war, visit your court, commission an epic, pet your dog, extort your vassals, or do most of the minor decisions. I’ve had characters die of stress because I couldn’t use a stress-removing decision while I waited for a feast to happen.

Additionally, the travel events are still really repetitive. This is especially egregious for landless adventurers, who for some reason get the same small set of events over and over again forever. In the Word from the Game Director dev diary it was mentioned that this sort of event spam was going to be reduced by adding cooldowns to how often they can occur. Is this update going to help address this issue? Or will a lot more travel events be added as a different way of fixing the problem?
 
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Inspection are singular, whereas Grand Tour are plural. Inspections focus on the place, and gives you more options on how to deal with and what you'd like to improve, whereas the Tour focus more on the ruler of the land. Inspections can be used on your own domain, whereas Tour can only be used in vassal lands.

So if I understand correctly - Inspection is supposed to be done in the demense/realm of a single vassal, rather than going all over the place checking on every vassal, right? More "in-depth search for problems" rather than "wide see if everything is alright in the country" if we were to use real life logic.

They are not always the same.

As in - traits and education can influence reward you get? For example 3-star Martial character on visiting Stamford Bridge PoI will get 200 XP and Organizer trait (provided they have less than 2 battle traits), while a 1-star Martial character will only receive 100 XP and the character with non-martial education, but a Brave trait will get 50 XP? Or do they all get the 200 XP for Stamford Bridge PoI?

Just wanted to clarify, because my question might not have been clear enough.
 
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As a travel-focused pack, we wanted to include something new for the players to see as they traveled around the map. One I had wanted to include for a while was points of interest focused on battles. These new points of interest will come in two forms: dynamically created ones as particular battles happen on the map and historical ones set up from the start of the game.
It has a couple of requirements, and it will have to fulfill a certain amount of them. It can be things like:
- Slaying your primary war opponent at war, or an heir of theirs
- Capturing one of them
- Battles with a lot of casualties
- Battles where you won with a significantly smaller army

Since you have answered the logic behind the dynamically created battle PoI, I have further questions : does the PoI decay over time? Is it able to be replaced or be merged by another battle on said barony? What about a very significant battle that happens in a place with special building like Rome and Jerusalem? If it's replaced, how does it determine which one takes priority? In case of a tiny county with multiple tiny baronies with multiple adjacent PoIs, would there be a way to make sure the PoI bubbles won't obscure the tiny baronies which would make clicking on it difficult? Sorry for making lots of questions, but I'm pretty excited for more travel flavor.
 
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Are there any significant changes/updates to the travel system? I think the base system added with the Tours and Tournaments update is pretty solid, but there are some rough points that could use alleviating. For example, if you host an event (feast, wedding, tournament) it often takes months or even years for everyone to arrive. During that time you can’t declare war, visit your court, pet your dog, extort your vassals, or do most of the minor decisions. I’ve had characters die of stress because I couldn’t use a stress-removing decision while I waited for a feast to happen.
We have not made an overarching changes to the travel system. It's a known issue though

Additionally, the travel events are still really repetitive. This is especially egregious for landless adventurers, who for some reason get the same small set of events over and over again forever. In the Word from the Game Director dev diary it was mentioned that this sort of event spam was going to be reduced by adding cooldowns to how often they can occur. Is this update going to help address this issue? Or will a lot more travel events be added as a different way of fixing the problem?
There will be two changes affecting this. I think we've added about ~50 new travel events, so that should ensure that see the same ones a bit less often, and we have added a new filter (which is the thing the Game Director talked about) to most of the travel events so you are unlikely to always see all of them on all characters.

So if I understand correctly - Inspection is supposed to be done in the demense/realm of a single vassal, rather than going all over the place checking on every vassal, right? More "in-depth search for problems" rather than "wide see if everything is alright in the country" if we were to use real life logic.
I would say that is pretty spot on, yes.

As in - traits and education can influence reward you get? For example 3-star Martial character on visiting Stamford Bridge PoI will get 200 XP and Organizer trait (provided they have less than 2 battle traits), while a 1-star Martial character will only receive 100 XP and the character with non-martial education, but a Brave trait will get 50 XP? Or do they all get the 200 XP for Stamford Bridge PoI?

Just wanted to clarify, because my question might not have been clear enough.
As in the rewards will be different based on which point of interest it is, and how many commander traits you have. But besides that, they mostly get the same reward.

Since you have answered the logic behind the dynamically created battle PoI, I have further questions : does the PoI decay over time? Is it able to be replaced or be merged by another battle on said barony? What about a very significant battle that happens in a place with special building like Rome and Jerusalem? If it's replaced, how does it determine which one takes priority? In case of a tiny county with multiple tiny baronies with multiple adjacent PoIs, would there be a way to make sure the PoI bubbles won't obscure the tiny baronies which would make clicking on it difficult? Sorry for making lots of questions, but I'm pretty excited for more travel flavor.

They cannot be replaced as they are set up right now, and they do not decay over time. We tried to set them up to replace one another, but it felt bad at times, and it is hard to compare one battle to another. As I have mentioned earlier, they are supposed to be quite rare, and they happen on barony level, so the chance of the same barony fulfilling the requirements twice would be very rare in any case. As for it happening in important areas like Rome and Jerusalem, they will then just be another point of interest in that area (similarly to how those areas already have several points of interests already).
 
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Can you guys fix it so we can see points of interest when planning the activity route? It's quite annoying to try to remember all the points of interest I want to visit when planning a pilgrimage or something. I think right now I can only see royal courts on the activity route map
 
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One essential philosophy of the new lifestyle tree is that we wanted it to be a tree where you had to engage with it rather than having it simply engage with you.

I will reiterate what I said in the previous thread: Why aren't the old Lifestyles just updated to use the Travel System? The three traveller trees already correspond to Stewardship, Martial and Diplomacy. This is just selling an update that should have happened with Tours.
 
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Not quite the right thread for this, so I'd rather we didn't turn it into a long back and forth conversation derailing the thread, but I will try to answer as best I can.
I guess we can boil the question down to, do I think we need to take steps to make the game more strategically challenging in an immersive way, right? (Correct me if I am wrong here).

I think we do, but I do not feel like these specific changes are at odds with that idea, and I think it's a greater challenge than something that could have been tackled in an event pack.

For this event pack, we are adding activities and lifestyles, and both of them have both an opportunity cost and a gold cost attached to them. For example, you could choose to invest your perks into the Wayfarer tree and unlock the hiking activity so you do not end up super stressed, but in turn, if you are purely looking at expanding your realm, arguably those points could have been better spent in one of the martial trees to give you bonuses at war, or in the stewardship tree to gain more gold or the one to gain more opinion with your vassals. Or any other myriad options.

You can talk about additive features, where you have a new feature that is on top of what already exists in the game, and then you can talk about multiplying the options in a feature that already exists. In this case, we are mostly doing the latter. In that sense, I am not too worried about trivializing the game with this DLC. If there are numbers that are too powerful with the event pack, those can be tuned down to be in line with what already exists.

As for the greater balance of the game, that is something that will be an on-going challenge for a long time to come, I imagine. It is something we are positive about doing, and are trying to set aside time to do, where we can. But it's also challenging in a game with many moving elements.
I appreciate you responding to this. I agree this pack was never going to solve it, and that's totally fine.

I was using this DLC as an example, but really RtP would be a better one. While it did make the game more immersive, which was great, it didn't bring any additional challenges to the game that sorely needed it. I feel that the Byz DLC would have been a great time to introduce empire-managing mechanics. And by that I mean include the challenges of having a big realm, that don't really exist in CK3 (or many paradox games, but Project Caesar looks like it's going for it). RtP included a lot, so I'm grateful for that, but didn't really make unrealistically big empires any harder to manage.

Mainly I just want to know whether you are planning to make the game more challenging in the ways I mentioned above. It sounds like you've talked about it, but it's not the highest priority, which is completely fine - I just wanted to understand where this game is going.

Thanks for making a solid game.
 
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Can you guys fix it so we can see points of interest when planning the activity route? It's quite annoying to try to remember all the points of interest I want to visit when planning a pilgrimage or something. I think right now I can only see royal courts on the activity route map
Not something I can promise or will happen in this event pack, but I can note it down.

I will reiterate what I said in the previous thread: Why aren't the old Lifestyles just updated to use the Travel System? The three traveller trees already correspond to Stewardship, Martial and Diplomacy. This is just selling an update that should have happened with Tours.
Because... that's just not what they are? First of, it's very easy to say "why didn't you just <X>?", but at the end of the day it boils down to resources. It wasn't done in T&T because that wasn't a part of the scope, it wasn't planned for, and nobody pushed for doing it.

It was done now, because we chose to focus more on the travel system, and we wanted to experiment with trying to make a new lifestyle for the game. It's our way of checking if people have an interest in more different lifestyles in the game, because if they do then there's a decent chance we will look at making more of them.
 
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Thanks for answering all questions! Do you know if this update is likely to break saves? Just still enjoying a post Roads to Power playthrough and would be good to know if can take time or need to wrap it up before Wandering Nobles is released?
 
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Thanks for answering all questions! Do you know if this update is likely to break saves? Just still enjoying a post Roads to Power playthrough and would be good to know if can take time or need to wrap it up before Wandering Nobles is released?
I don't think we have added anything that will massively break saves, but I cannot promise anything here. When we move between these major versions, it's always a bit of a toss up. But I would say it is most likely going to be fine, with some minor issues. Basically, we have made two changes, that might mess it up a bit; a new artifact slot, and some very minor map changes.
 
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Are there any significant changes/updates to the travel system? I think the base system added with the Tours and Tournaments update is pretty solid, but there are some rough points that could use alleviating. For example, if you host an event (feast, wedding, tournament) it often takes months or even years for everyone to arrive. During that time you can’t declare war, visit your court, commission an epic, pet your dog, extort your vassals, or do most of the minor decisions. I’ve had characters die of stress because I couldn’t use a stress-removing decision while I waited for a feast to happen.
If your sole reason for hosting the event is to lose stress, you can just reduce the number of invitees to those who will arrive in a reasonable amount of time. You can already guarantee that it will start in days or weeks rather than having to wait years.
 
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